Month: February 2018

This is only tangentially related to poetry, but I have nothing else interesting to say this week, so here we go. Joseph North has predicted the death of the liberal arts  (including poetry)  as we know it unless it becomes commercially viable. Let me elaborate.

In Literary Criticism; a Concise Political History, Joseph North opens with a startling truth. In the past forty years, literary studies have shifted entirely from critical to scholarly analysis. He says this is because of our slow shift to a free-market economy, and because base informs superstructure, (because our economy affects our culture,) we have fundamentally changed as a people to better suit the economic machine. This is why there’s been a massive pressure in recent years to shift to STEM careers instead of the humanities and the arts. Why our own arts program here at Geneseo was slashed only a few years ago. The arts and humanities as we know them aren’t easily profitable, so they’re not widely praised as important. (Remember the starving artist trope.) Literary studies has shifted from didactic revelation to more historical analysis; not a force to change culture, but one to churn out information and facts that can be more easily monetized in textbooks. I fear poetry may follow suit unless it finds a niche in consumer content. It may have already: Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey has found incredible commercial success in the past couple years, even landing a spot on the New York Times #1 Best-Selling list. If the base decides that, like Kaur’s work, poetry is commercially viable, then it will be kept around in future generations. If not, it may follow the path of our own art department. Non-existent.

People are scared of brevity. It’s a limit: the amount of time we are allowed to walk on this Earth, kiss the people we love, watch the sunset. Everything centers around time. Length.

As a poet, I am scared of brevity. I am afraid that my poems will be lacking if they do not filtrate at least half the page. While I have written poems that are shorter, even upon completion, I felt as if they were missing complexity and depth in their truncated state.

This is not to say that I do not admire short poems; there is a tremendous amount of craft in poems that can create feeling and beauty in a smattering of lines. As poets we fall in love with individual lines in a poem before we profess our love for the entire poem. Yet, I still feel as if I must prove something in each poem- instill it with meaning- which often requires a substantial amount of space.

I find it difficult to forge a poem out of a few lines, a few words, though I know it is entirely possible. Look at haikus. People have been writing three-line poems for centuries. Haikus do not seem to be lacking; however, I am still unable to pinpoint what my personal poems seem to be missing when they are condensed.

Does anyone have other thoughts on short poems? Any experience writing short poems?

I wish we could “thumbs up ” each other’s blog posts, so even if a blog post doesn’t get comments, the author can still know people are reading it.

At some point between sophomore and junior year, I embraced “individual reader response criticism” (IRRC, for short) as the primary measure of my own poetry’s quality.  If you didn’t read The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (perhaps you read something more scholarly), RRC represents the idea that how a reader experiences and interprets a written work is paramount.  The “independent” part indicates that there is no objective interpretation of a written work.  Now, deciding to view all literary interpretations of my poetry as valid (within reason) was an odd move for me.  Why would I, the person who insists on a single, objective answer for the meaning of life (to take care of one’s mitochondria) and the inherent nature of humans (we’re inherently selfish) allow for anything I write to be interpreted differently from my own interpretation?

Because I’d rather have more people get something decent out of my poetry than a few people get the right thing from it.

Maybe it’s selling out, but I’ve accepted positive reception quantity over interpretational accuracy.  Because I can’t control what people think, it would be highly difficult to write a poem that is understood by all readers the way I intend and also keep the poem’s poetic qualities (i.e. flow, form…).  What can I tell ya?  I like when people like my writing.  And if they get something out of it that I didn’t intend and liked it, I’m just gonna keep my mouth shut and accept the praise.

I’ve recently been thinking about the poem from Carey McHugh’s American Gramophone that my group observed in class this week. The poem was “Death (as a Woman) Comes for the Draughtsman” on page 54. I remember we pointed out the idea of “stopping,” particularly in the first couple lines: “But there are horses / to be broken”. Then I realized something. The term “breaking a horse” means to train it. A broke horse is one that’s safe to ride. Here’s a description I found online:

“A well broke horse is one that is well trained and understands more than just the basics of go and whoa. A horse that is said to be broke to saddle or harness indicates what the horse has been trained for. Saddle breaking is training a horse to carry a rider, and harness breaking is training the horse to pull a vehicle.” Continue reading ““Horses to be Broken””

I don’t know if anyone else has been encountering this, but as of late there seems to be some kind of influx of teen nihilists and kid Camus’s. It feels like the wannabe Nietzsche convention just let out across the block and all the new converts to existentialism are eager to give me their spiel. I’ve had plenty of people telling me something along the lines of “It doesn’t matter anyway” or “Nothing matters”. There are many variations on this but the sentiment stays the same throughout. Maybe it has something to do with a certain cartoon? Who can say?

All I know is that I’m getting pretty sick of it. It’d be a different story if these people caught me in my sophomore year of highschool. Back when I’d successfully convinced myself that no one beyond myself could be proven to exist. That I was an island of consciousness in a sea of pre-programmed encounters and interactions. Yeah I’ll admit it, I was something of a solipsist.

Me and all these new wave nihilists would have had a lot to talk about back then. But I’m over that now, being the only special individual with free will in a world of predestination got boring. I wanted my mother and father and friends back. I wanted light and warmth in my life again.

I pretty much subscribe to the whole “meaning is where you put it” philosophy on life. It’s a lot more fun that way. Sure I still have “What’s the point?” moments, seconds where the vast absurdity of everything comes at me like a tidal wave, but I’ve gotten fairly adept at shrugging them off. If I just keeping doing the things I love, the strangers from my subconscious will stay in their cellars, and abstain from holding that cold cloth between me and the world. However, this is a little more difficult with people yapping at me to abandon the futile torch I hold up to the darkness of the universe. “It’ll just burn out eventually”, sure it will, but for now can’t there be a little light?

Can’t I write some poetry, good and bad (I’ve always thought that the bad sort, in fact, is sometimes the most seeped in the human soul), read some great books, relish my morning coffee, converse with people I care about. I don’t have to be constantly reminded of my mortality. I’ve listened to Kansas’s “Dust in the Wind” enough times to know that I’ve got an expiration date and all I say and do will one day be forgotten. I don’t mean to rain on anyone’s parade raining, but please leave me out of it. I’m sick of having to compare the tenuous fibers of my happiness to the awaiting empty expanse of eternity.

There’s a lot of scary things that happen when you want to become a writer, for example:

People ask “what do you hope to do with your degree?” and you say “write” and they say “okay, but how will you make a living?” and thus you are propelled into a brief existential crisis wherein your heart yells “WRITE!” and your brain momentarily devolves into a static of golden arches and cash register cha-ching noises and Big Macs and concludes “probably McDonald’s.”

After that conversation, you recall that the last McDonald’s you were at had no more than three employees working, as the cashiers had been replaced with big touch-screens, and you wonder if maybe another fast food chain, a Burger King or Wendy’s (or if you’re really desperate, a Taco Bell) will hold off on replacing all human intelligence with robots in time for you to secure a job post-graduation.

But you push all of that to the back of your head, right? And you just keep writing, you keep writing until you have something, something worth sharing. And you take that thing worth sharing and you try to share it, you copy and paste it into a Google Doc and download the Google Doc as a .pdf or .txt file so that it’s in one of the accepted submission file types and you look over the piece one more time when you realize you can’t. It’s about somebody. The poem is about somebody, the type of somebody who will make sure that they see the poem.

Yeah, the looming prospect of unemployment is certainly scary, as is the inevitable take-over of artificial intelligence. The scariest part of writing, though, for me at least, is trying to figure out how to reckon with writing what you want to write about (or, rather, who you want to write about) responsibly. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, perhaps because the poems which I feel most strongly about are the poems which tackle the things that are closest to me, and oftentimes those things are people. I find myself most proud of the poems which are confined to a private existance for one reason or another.

I’ll leave you with a quote that’s been bouncing around my head for a good couple of days now. Moshe Kasher, while reflecting on the time he was sued over a line in his memoir, said on Episode #943 of the Joe Rogan Experience, “You can’t just grab memories thinking that all of your memories belong to you because other people are in them, ya know?”

This isn’t exactly a blog post, but more of a solicitation:

Would anyone be interested in a poetry book swap? I have a multitude of contemporary and modern poetry books that have literally (yes, literally) changed my writing forever. I’d love to share them and also acquire some new inspiration from you all.

I was in the shower so I could not tell my nose was bleeding
Dripped down my body to the floor right below my feet and
I looked in the mirror at my face, I thought I had a disease
-Jack White, “Missing Pieces”

There are some who frame sleeplessness as edgy or desirable, and this is a temptation that occurs only until one is actually staring at the ceiling at 3:50am with Jack White’s voice blaring through their mind.  Don’t get me wrong, he’s a great guy and all (I guess) and an excellent musician; in fact, I’m going to see him perform this May. But I would appreciate not being woken up by his antics, especially because the words and sounds fit together seamlessly to become stuck like gum on the bottom of my shoe. “Missing Pieces” isn’t exactly a bedtime lullaby.

But I can’t blame Jack White for my lack of sleep. I often have dreams with “arguments,” and by this word I mean that I will have to solve some kind of task. Because dreams are oftentimes nonsensical, this task is impossible for me to complete, and I will wake up frustrated, “dazed and confused,” as it were (to continue with the music theme, and maybe I could compare the desire for the elusive woman in Led Zeppelin’s song to my overwhelming desire for the likewise elusive rest).

Last night I had one of these dreams of arguments, where I, as a Creative Writing major, had to singlehandedly work through the logic, i.e. the epistemology and ontology, of poetry, understanding and explaining them for an assignment (I know, it sounds like one of those didn’t-study-woke-up-late-for-the-exam kinds of dreams). But I think it goes deeper than that. To consider questions like these in such depth cuts to the marrow of who I am as a writer and publicly displays my insecurities. Of course, I couldn’t accomplish such an argument, so I woke up disoriented with “Missing Pieces” blaring in my head and had to explain to myself why it’s okay that I couldn’t do it.

I am not making this up. “Missing Pieces.” After a dream about an impossible assignment. *cue face palm* (and by that term I have just aged myself. Ah well.)

But what’s even more fascinating about all of this is that yesterday I was actually confirming in my mind the importance of collaboration and community, and understanding how important these are in every writer’s (and author’s) growth, professionally and personally, for enjoyment purposes and also for mutual caring. Successful authors would not have written the incredible works they did without an editor, a publisher, a workshop, a mentor, a friend, and, more crucially, a family. I’ve been asking questions like “Is it okay to go to office hours just to spend time getting to know my professors?” and “Why don’t creative writing students enjoy each others’ presences outside of class more often?” (These questions expose the sociologist in me.)

Of course, no person can singlehandedly define poetry or writing in general, or examine its core theoretical premises and explain them. This is a semi-developed tradition that requires collaboration. It’s a tradition that’s continuing to develop as we humans write, and write about, our writing. I don’t think that we can know everything, or even close to everything, and I’m comforted by this. But I do think that by caring for each other and prioritizing each others’ needs, we can fill in the gaps here and there where I (or you, or someone else) may have “missing pieces.” I view this as an ongoing way to move towards a culture of caring, a culture shared by those who love words and sounds.

What is writers block? How can I avoid writers block? Does everyone get writers block?

The way I describe writers block is when you (the writer) are at a complete dead stop and can no longer think of anything to write, and I mean anything. It literally feels like someone wiped your brain of all potential thoughts, and or ideas. Imagine you’re driving a car on the highway and you have to take a detour, but when you exit the highway, there are no signs telling you which way to take the detour so you just start driving around aimlessly for hours until you finally give up. That’s what writers block feels like.

I don’t think there’s any true way to avoid writers block, just ways to help prevent it.  When you find yourself writing and start to lose momentum and it feels like you’re pulling teeth trying to make sense on the page, walk away. Just walk away. If you try to sit there making sense of the random words you’re spewing out. It just wont work. So, step away, drop the pencil, close the laptop, and walk away. Watch a movie, or take a nap, do something to distract your mind from what you were trying to write. When the time feels write, come back to your piece and crank out some more work. It’s like what they say, “Rome wasn’t built in a day”. And it’s true. Your work is not completed in one day, it takes time to craft what you’re thinking. So don’t stress about writers block, it’s a natural state of creative writing and everyone goes through it.

I myself am guilty for not following the advice I just gave above. I always feel like there is this insane amount of pressure to get everything out and in the open, as if I only have one shot to write what I wanna write. But that is so false. The good thing about creative writing is that you can go back any time and change and/or add whatever you want. I’m guilty of trying to act like I always know what I want to write, but I often find myself at a loss as soon as I grab a pen or open my laptop.

Writers block is never fun but with patience and acceptance that no one/nothing is perfect, we can over come this deadly mental block and create some of our best work.